


Over the Sea to Skye

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Lighthouses, Scotland, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 08:07:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11939910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: Marcus Kane has lived in the village of Arkadia, on Scotland's Isle of Skye, all his life, and none of the holiday tourists who show up to rent the lighthouse stay very long.  He's pretty sure the new American woman won't either.  Which is a relief, since he immediately decides to dislike her.Until they find themselves stranded together inside the lighthouse during a storm, and irritation turns to something else altogether.





	Over the Sea to Skye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [convenientmisfires](https://archiveofourown.org/users/convenientmisfires/gifts), [victorias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/victorias/gifts).



> I have five million unfinished multi-chapter works on my plate and a long list of commissioned custom fics to finish and thus there is absolutely no excuse for this one except that I'm currently watching "LOST" for the first time and once I thought about the idea of an AU where Kane was Scottish and talked like Desmond I could not get it out of my head. I regret nothing.
> 
> Also I have always wanted to live in a lighthouse so this is blatant wish fulfillment with a side of architecture porn to go with the real porn. I don't regret this either.

  **MARCUS**

The American woman would not stay long, Marcus was sure of it.

They’d had tourists in the lighthouse before, trendy it was now, young couples from all over thinking they’d be getting some kind of “authentic Scottish experience” before realizing all too soon that the “quaint” and “historic” they’d been promised in the advertisement only meant “small.”  Historic it certainly was, but what does that matter?  People never want old things as much as they think they do.  They liked the photos of the cozy little round brick bedroom, its porthole window peeking out at the silver-blue sky, until they arrived and realized the wee galley kitchen hadn’t a microwave and the elderly iron stove was a temperamental beast which only agreed to light with great coaxing.  (Marcus’ own cottage was nearly as old as the lighthouse, but at least it had a kitchen from this century.  Or, well, all right, _very late_ in the last century, but still.  How Thelonious got along nine months out of the year cooking out of that monstrosity he'd never understood.)  Japanese tourists it had been, last winter, and a Dutch couple the winter before.  All booked the lighthouse for the whole three months; all departed in a huff after less than a fortnight, demanding a refund and making their way to the golf resort twenty miles inland instead.  No one in the village of Arkadia had been sad to see them go.  Not even Marcus, and he was the lighthouse’s nearest neighbor, three miles down the cliff walk, meaning it would fall to him to man the lantern room should a storm descend while Thelonious was away.

He’d seen little of the American woman, who had arrived on Tuesday by the village ferry, a rather grandiose term for the decrepit boat Emori had inherited from her grandfather and charged an arm and a leg for passage around the island and across the inlet to Applecross, on the mainland.  The lighthouse was located on a low, rocky shoal, connected to the shoreline by forty feet or so of stone breakwater, wide enough to walk along but which flooded at high tide - though only by a few inches, so any native could still make the trek perfectly well in a pair of good waders, but he doubted that would be something the American woman had.  Hadn’t seemed the type.  Posh-looking, he’d thought, though he’d only glimpsed her at a distance; he’d been walking Brutus along the shoreline when Emori docked near the breakwater and helped her passenger out of the boat.  Posh leather luggage, too.  

No, this one wouldn’t last long.

She’d been spotted at the village grocer's on Wednesday morning, so Marcus hadn’t expected to see her again two days later when he walked up the hill with Brutus to do his own shopping.  Someone must have told her Friday was when they brought the fresh fish in, for there she was, in line with her basket, cash at the ready, along with everyone else.  Marcus was annoyed, though without a very good reason; only that here she was, behaving like a local, when everyone knew perfectly well she was a rich big-city doctor from Boston or Chicago or San Francisco or the like (one American city was exactly like another to the fishermen of Arkadia, except New York, which they all knew from television) and would be returning home again in February just like all the others had . . . if not sooner.

She did not belong here.  She ought not to have looked at ease.  She ought to have looked like the others had done, a foreign tourist suddenly realizing she’d made a terrible and expensive mistake.  But instead she was calm and quiet, proper rubber wellies up to her knees indicating that she’d walked here, like a local ought, instead of calling for Emori's costly ferry again.  Emori made a fortune off the lighthouse tourists, but this one appeared, so far, not yet to have been outsmarted.  Already she seemed different from the others.

He stood three places behind her in the fish queue, studying her from behind, shifting his weight slightly to move when she moved, attempting to get a better look at the face hidden by masses of caramel-colored hair.  She was a small woman, her slender frame nearly swallowed up by the wool coat she’d taken from the hook by the lighthouse door.  The fact of the coat was an astonishment.  Surely there was a chic American coat in those leather suitcases somewhere, surely she'd packed clothes of her own, clothes that fit her properly.  What on earth was she doing in this?  Marcus had hung his own coat on the hook by the lighthouse door a thousand times in his life on visits of his own, and not once had he seen anyone wear that coat.  It predated Thelonious.  Ancient it was, smelling faintly of wet moss even though no one ever took it out so it was always perfectly dry.  He hadn't the faintest idea to which past lighthouse-keeper it had once belonged.  But it suited the American woman, which irritated him greatly; she looked _right_ in it somehow, no matter that it swept down nearly to the tips of her wellies, or that her slender wrists were half-swallowed up by its heavy sleeves, like a wee girl playing dress-up in her father’s clothing.  The muted greens and purples and reds of the faded Skye tartan brought out a shimmer in that rich brown hair which snapped in the frosty wind like the sails of a ship. 

She paid for her fish, thanked the McIntyre girl as she wrapped it in paper and tied it with twine, and turned to go, making her way from the fish stall down the high street to the market.  She passed so near Marcus that a ribbon of brown hair fluttered against his shoulder in the high breeze; but she was looking downward, fiddling with the contents of her basket to make room for the fish, so he still did not see her face.  Just the featherlight touch of her hair on his woolen sweater, a faint whiff of lavender, and she was gone.

“No more haddock,” said Harper apologetically when he finally reached the head of the queue.  “The American lady got the last of it.”

And that was when he decided he hated her.

* * * * *

She’d only just left the grocer's when he walked in, so naturally they were all still buzzing.  Marcus eavesdropped as he filled his basket, and came away with the impression that Arkadia’s opinions of the American woman were, at best, conflicting.

David Miller, who owned the market, and young Jasper from the pub, had taken to her immediately, and both seemed willing to wager that this one might really make a go of it - maybe lasting the whole three months, or at least longer than any of the other foreigners had.  Jasper liked everyone, but David was more circumspect, and Marcus tended to trust his opinion in weighty matters, making this unexpectedly treasonous partiality to the woman who'd stolen his fish all the more of an annoyance.  But David's son Nathan was far more dubious.  (Nathan had a bit of a criminal record, and a history of occasionally catastrophic lapses in judgment, so Marcus chose not to examine too closely this sudden reversal of a lifetime's worth of experience that Miller Sr.'s judgment was frequently the steadier of the two.)  Nathan's young man, Dr. Jackson, was of his father-in-law's opinion, only more so; more than any of the others, he seemed entranced with the woman.  Never mind that she'd told Thelonious she was retired, and certainly it was unlikely she'd be making the time to take on an eager young village doctor as her apprentice while she was technically on vacation.  But after only a few sentences of pleasantries exchanged, Dr. Jackson’s good opinion of her was set, and could no more be budged than a cliff.  Marcus kept a straight face while the young couple bickered as Nathan weighed and wrapped the lamb chops, and quietly thanked his stars they had not chosen tonight to invite him over for dinner.

Young Miller and Dr. Jackson were a source of enormous pride to the tiny village of Arkadia, which in 2017 only boasted around five hundred permanent residents; they’d all felt very cosmopolitan indeed when Nathan had returned from university to help his father run the business and they’d realized the village had its very own homosexual.  “Just like on _Will & Grace,_” the elders announced proudly to many a niece or nephew in Edinburgh (a program which had only just arrived last year on their local television station).  And so of course, in a village with so little to do, it had taken less than a day after the new doctor had arrived and his orientation had become known for every nosy maiden aunt to attempt to take matters into her own hands in a veritable frenzy of increasingly-less-subtle matchmaking.  Marcus had known Nathan since birth (quite literally; the contractions had come on too quickly for the thirty-mile drive to the hospital, so he’d been born on the floor of the pub, and Marcus had cut the umbilical cord himself) and he’d never seen the boy more content, despite their relationship’s rather comical beginnings.  But Dr. Jackson’s admiration of the American woman grated on Marcus’ nerves, and he found himself resenting the young man for it, even as the two Blake siblings rose markedly in his esteem for pronouncing her “a bit too stern.”  The Blakes thought all adults were too stern, of course, and liked virtually none except for him; but in his current mood, it endeared them to Marcus a good deal.

But then, today was only the fourth.  She’d be gone by Christmas.  Back to Chicago or Boston or wherever she damn well pleased, back to her posh apartment (he imagined) and big-city job (he assumed).  He could avoid her until then.

She would never last.  She’d be gone in a fortnight.  There was no point in even learning her name.

* * *

**ABBY**

Anyone who knew Dr. Abigail Griffin, and had heard the villagers openly speculating on how soon she'd give up and go home, would have laughed outright in their faces.  Even Abby, in higher spirits, might have found it amusing; tenacity, after all, was what she was known for.  But she wasn’t inclined these days to find much of anything funny, and she’d scarcely even registered Marcus Kane’s existence except as the tall man with the dog in line behind her for fish.  The dog she’d noticed, a true Scottish deerhound, lanky and angular and the size of a small pony.  She'd spotted him on the beach, in fact, when that charming young con artist of a ferrywoman had dropped her off at the doorstep of the lighthouse, and recognized him again when she saw him at the fish market, his thick silvery coat flecked with the same salt-and-pepper hues as his master’s beard.  That was all she’d noticed about the man, really, except that he was tall, and that he seemed in some essentially Scottish way to match his dog.  

(Abby had always wanted a dog like that, a big, clever, gentle one; but Jake was allergic, so Clarke had only had goldfish.)

She forgot about both hound and man the moment she left them, however, since they hadn't followed her into the shops, saving her the trouble of pretending not to notice them staring and whispering, like everyone else seemed to be doing.  She supposed this was perhaps to be expected, though she'd never lived in a small town; but really, if there was no way to do her shopping without having the contents of her basket examined by a dozen pairs of eyes, she'd have to start driving thirty miles into the next town every time she needed tampons, or risk every resident of Arkadia knowing every detail of her menstrual cycle.

Nobody here remembered her, of course.  There was no reason why they should.  She’d been twenty-five, then, and Jake twenty-four, when they’d come through the village on their honeymoon.  It had been Jake’s idea to stay in the lighthouse, a quintessentially Jake Griffin notion, the kind of impractical romanticism that had made life with him both a headache and an adventure.  They’d always meant to come back someday, they’d talked about it every summer, wanting to show it to Clarke, but somehow life got in the way and they never had.

And now, of course, Jake was gone.

As was Clarke, though only by geography; art school in Australia had taken her half a world away from Baltimore, and weekly phone calls weren’t enough to fill the ache of loneliness in Abby’s heart, so she’d thrown herself even more fervently into work.  Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery was a demanding job, and she was the best there was; or at any rate, she had been.

Until Maya.

But no, Abby would not let herself think about Maya anymore.  That chapter of her life was over.  No parent would ever place their child’s life in Dr. Griffin’s hands again.  She had stripped off her bloody latex gloves, shed her scrubs (leaving them on the floor for the first time in her entire career), gathered her things from her office, and walked out the door.  It was four a.m.  She never went back.

That had been nearly a month ago.

The lighthouse had been an impulse decision, but she hadn’t regretted it yet.  For some reason, in the absence of work, she’d found the ghosts of Jake in their Baltimore house suddenly intolerable.  Maybe the long hours had kept them at bay in the six years since he’d died, or maybe it had been having her daughter in the house; New York was not so far from Baltimore that it kept Clarke from coming home on every vacation and occasional weekends, hauling carloads of friends along with her.  But Australia was a different story, and for the first time in Clarke’s life they wouldn’t even be together for Christmas, which had triggered some aching melancholy in Abby that Baltimore left her unable to shake.

She could, she supposed, have gone anywhere in the world.  She could have spent Christmas in Vermont with Callie, who'd invited her over and over, throwing in how much the kids missed their Aunt Abby as a bribe.  Hell, she could have gone to Mexico or Hawaii or the Caribbean, she could be drinking mai tais on a beach right now.  She wasn’t sure why she’d suddenly remembered the rainy little village in Skye where she’d spent one night with Jake so many years ago, or what had possessed her to say yes to an advertisement for a full three-month stay to serve as the lighthouse-keeper.  It was a working lighthouse, the ad had cautioned, and though winter storms were rare they did exist, so she might in fact be called upon to operate the lantern and hail a boat home.  But for the most part, she’d be alone at the top of a tower at the very edge of the world, looking out over a cold gray sea.

This sounded more than acceptable to Abby.

* * * * *

Thelonious met her off the ferry and spent an afternoon orienting her on the lighthouse’s inner workings before Emori returned to take him to Applecross.  From there he’d board a train to Inverness, then another to Edinburgh, then a flight to Los Angeles, where he’d be staying for the next three months with his son.  He rented out the lighthouse from December through February of every year, though she gathered that few past tenants had endured that entire three-month span.  She supposed she could see why.  Arkadia was small, and not the pleasantly tourist-friendly sort of “quaint”; the rooms inside the lighthouse were dark and cramped with little round porthole windows, and the kitchen was positively ancient.  The one truly magnificent room was the circular parlor at the top of the tower, from whose corner a wrought-iron spiral staircase led up to the vast glassy bulk of the lantern room and the iron “widow’s walk” that surrounded it.  The parlor had higher ceilings than the dim little bedroom and kitchen below, and its vast windows opened out onto the choppy dark waters.  This, Thelonious told her, had been the first lighthouse-keeper's watch room, but slowly, over the decades and even centuries, it had become the place where the tower's residents did most of their actual living.  It had a vast stone fireplace, blazing merrily even though it was not yet dark (the lighthouse had had modern heating installed in the 1980s, theoretically, but it was dubious at best), bounded on either side with tall shelves crammed full of books and the accumulated detritus of two hundred forty years' of lighthouse keepers - old glass fishing floats, ships in bottles, a brass sextant, a next of sparrow eggs, perfectly preserved. Two huge, cozy, mismatched armchairs faced the fireplace, but the moment Thelonious left and the ferry sailed away, Abby immediately dragged one over to the other side of the room, along with an ottoman and a small wooden tea table.  It was drafty on this side, but she didn’t mind it.  She did not like to turn her back on the sea.

She’d made this her spot, as the days passed, sometimes staring out at the water in silence, sometimes diligently filling out the daily weather log Thelonious had left her (a cracked hardback ledger, pages permanently warped by saltwater damp), sometimes working her way through the shelves of books beside the fireplace.  (If the library had a running theme of some kind, it appeared to be seafarers; by the end of the first week she'd made her way through _The Voyage of Saint Brendan_ and _Mutiny on the Bounty_ and started in on _Life of Pi_.)  It was very quiet, and very solitary, but she had too many thoughts occupying her to be bored; if she was lonely, she did not permit herself to feel it, but it was certain that she was more alone than she had ever been in all her life.

She thought she ought to mind it more, but she didn't.  It felt right to her, somehow, like this was what she deserved.  Three months alone in a tower, with no company but the gulls and the weather.

No house full of boisterous college students.  No chaotic operating room full of machinery beeping and surgeons barking orders.  No husband, no daughter. 

Just Abby, alone with the sea.


End file.
